Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

stepped outside. Her face had brightened when she came back; there was a smiling, even-featured prettiness, drawn out by that phone call, that Ifemelu had not earlier seen.
    “Emeka work late today. So only Chijioke come to see you, before we finish,” she said, as if she and Ifemelu had planned it all together.
    “Look, you don’t have to ask them to come. I won’t even know what to tell them,” Ifemelu said.
    “Tell Chijioke Igbo can marry not Igbo.”
    “Aisha, I can’t tell him to marry you. He will marry you if he wants to.”
    “They want marry me. But I am not Igbo!” Aisha’s eyes glittered; the woman had to be a little mentally unstable.
    “Is that what they told you?” Ifemelu asked.
    “Emeka say his mother tell him if he marry American, she kill herself,” Aisha said.
    “That’s not good.”
    “But me, I am African.”
    “So maybe she won’t kill herself if he marries you.”
    Aisha looked blankly at her. “Your boyfriend mother want him to marry you?”
    Ifemelu thought first of Blaine, then she realized that Aisha, of course, meant her make-believe boyfriend.
    “Yes. She keeps asking us when we will get married.” She was amazed by her own fluidness, it was as if she had convinced even herself that she was not living on memories mildewed by thirteen years. But it could have been true; Obinze’s mother had liked her, after all.
    “Ah!” Aisha said, in well-meaning envy.
    A man with dry, graying skin and a mop of white hair came in with a plastic tray of herbal potions for sale.
    “No, no, no,” Aisha said to him, palm raised as though to ward him off. The man retreated. Ifemelu felt sorry for him, hungry-looking in his worn dashiki, and wondered how much he could possibly make from his sales. She should have bought something.
    “You talk Igbo to Chijioke. He listen to you,” Aisha said. “You talk Igbo?”
    “Of course I speak Igbo,” Ifemelu said, defensive, wondering if Aisha was again suggesting that America had changed her. “Take it easy!” she added, because Aisha had pulled a tiny-toothed comb through a section of her hair.
    “Your hair hard,” Aisha said.
    “It is not hard,” Ifemelu said firmly. “You are using the wrongcomb.” And she pulled the comb from Aisha’s hand and put it down on the table.

    IFEMELU HAD GROWN UP in the shadow of her mother’s hair. It was black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. Her father called it a crown of glory. “Is it your real hair?” strangers would ask, and then reach out to touch it reverently. Others would say “Are you from Jamaica?” as though only foreign blood could explain such bounteous hair that did not thin at the temples. Through the years of childhood, Ifemelu would often look in the mirror and pull at her own hair, separate the coils, will it to become like her mother’s, but it remained bristly and grew reluctantly; braiders said it cut them like a knife.
    One day, the year Ifemelu turned ten, her mother came home from work looking different. Her clothes were the same, a brown dress belted at the waist, but her face was flushed, her eyes unfocused. “Where is the big scissors?” she asked, and when Ifemelu brought it to her, she raised it to her head and, handful by handful, chopped off all her hair. Ifemelu stared, stunned. The hair lay on the floor like dead grass. “Bring me a big bag,” her mother said. Ifemelu obeyed, feeling herself in a trance, with things happening that she did not understand. She watched her mother walk around their flat, collecting all the Catholic objects, the crucifixes hung on walls, the rosaries nested in drawers, the missals propped on shelves. Her mother put them all in the polyethylene bag, which she carried to the backyard, her steps quick, her faraway look unwavering. She made a